Welcome to the TechMame right home for Wednesday, January 29th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. Essentially, Open AI suspects that DeepSeek might have copied them. I'll explain the term distillation. Could you soon be able to connect to Starlink on your iPhone? Is Comcast about to make the internet better? And the hopeful return of commercial supersonic flight.

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

Remember how people found that if you asked DeepSeek what model it was,

it sometimes said it was an OpenAI model?

Well, OpenAI says it has seen some evidence that DeepSeek used distillation to train its open source competitor by using outputs from OpenAIs proprietary models.

Quoting the FT, the technique is used by developers to obtain better performance on smaller models by using

outputs from larger, more capable ones, allowing them to achieve similar results on specific

tasks at a much lower cost. Distillation is a common practice in the industry, but the concern

was that DeepSeek may be doing it to build its own rival model, which is a breach of open AIs

terms of service. The issue is when you take it out of the platform

and are doing it to create your own model for your own purposes, said one person close to

Open AI, Open AI declined to comment further or provide details of its evidence. Its terms of service

state users cannot copy any of its services or, quote, use output to develop models that compete

with OpenAI, end quote.

And quoting Bloomberg, Microsoft security researchers in the fall observed individuals they

believe may be linked to Deepseek, exfiltrating a large amount of data using the OpenAI

application programming interface or API, said the people who ask not to be identified because

the matter is confidential. Software developers can

pay for a license to use the API to integrate OpenAI's proprietary artificial intelligence

models into their own applications. Microsoft, an OpenAI technology partner and its largest investor,

notified Open AI of the activity the people said. Such activity could violate OpenAI's terms of service

or could indicate the group acted to remove OpenAI's restrictions on how much data they could violate OpenAI's terms of service or could indicate the group acted to remove

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